Archive for the ‘Email marketing’ Category

How many times have you been told that the words used in your email’s subject line can doom it to the spam folder? Or that the best time to send emails is at a particular hour on a particular day? Or that you should only target the most engaged subscribers?

After conducting a careful analysis of a huge amount of email performance data, Alchemy Worx – a specialist email marketing agency based in London and Atlanta, GA – claims that seven of the most common myths about email marketing are in fact false.

Alchemy Worx’s research has highlighted an urgent need for marketers to re-think much of the commonly cited wisdom about email marketing. The exposed myths include:

Consumers are drowning in emails from trusted brands.

Fact: Sixty percent of consumers receive fewer than six brand emails per day.

Consumers like to click the spam button.

Fact: Less than one subscriber per 2,000 will mark an email as spam.

If brands send more emails, consumers simply ignore more.

Fact: If you send four emails in a month instead of one, the number of consumers who will open at least one email doubles.

The subject line can send the email to the spam folder.

Fact: Keywords have little to no effect on whether an email ends up in the spam folder.

With more than half of online marketers said to be giving email marketing greater priority than building their social media communities, a new YouGov survey – commissioned by Emailvision – warns that poor email marketing communications can negatively affect consumer sentiment toward a company or brand.

Consumers are just as likely to turn against their favourite brands as other brands if they are bombarded with too many marketing emails, the survey suggests.

It found that three-quarters of UK consumers would dislike a brand after being bombarded with marketing emails, while 71% of consumers said being sent unsolicited messages would also make them resentful of a brand.

Other factors that can make consumers resentful of their favourite brands include listing their name incorrectly in an email (50%) and getting their gender wrong (40%).

The survey also revealed that 40% of respondents would refuse to share any personal information with a brand in exchange for better targeted offers, rising to 49% among the over-50s. The only personal details they would be willing to share are their name (28%), their age (37%), and their gender (38%).

Emailvision director Neil Hamilton said: “When a customer purchases from your in-store business, they give you money in exchange for a product or service. When a visitor interacts with your online business, they are giving you their data in exchange for a relevant experience with your brand.

“If a business doesn’t choose to make use of this data correctly, they are missing out on important knowledge that could positively or negatively impact business for years to come.”

He added: “It’s imperative that a customer never becomes ‘just a number’ even in a database of millions. Technology enables all businesses to treat their customers to a personalised experience across multiple sales channels.”